If you don’t find
what you’re looking for at ABYC, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble have
excellent selections of yacht-design and boat-design books. Bluewater Books
& Charts (formerly, The Armchair Sailor), one of North America's leading
maritime bookstores, has a database that includes more than 35,000 marine
books, videos, software programs and charts covering 140 defined subject areas.
Between 300 and 500 new titles are added monthly.

Reviews

Note: These reviews are
informational only. Good sources for books are Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and
Bluewater Books & Charts www.bluewaterweb.com. (Search under "Yacht
Design" or "Boat Design".) Your local bookstore can also order
books for you by providing them with the ISBN number.

Westlawn graduate and
acclaimed author Dave Gerr has written a comprehensive handbook for
calculating scantlings for boats and yachts. “The Elements of Boat Strength”
presents scantling rules developed by the author for calculating the structure
of monohull vessels of between 10 and 120 feet LOA, both power and sail,
displacement or planing, and making speeds up to 45 knots. The rules apply to
boats built by conventional methods of fiberglass, wood, wood-epoxy composite,
steel, and aluminum.

An excellent
discussion of each material precedes the section on calculating the scantlings
for that material. This should equip the reader with the necessary background
to be able to apply the scantlings intelligently. The scantlings themselves are
so inclusive that they cover virtually every structure. And there is more good
news. They are so easy to calculate that anyone who can handle ordinary
arithmetic and find exponents using an inexpensive scientific calculator will
have no trouble working any of the formulas. In addition, the author provides a
worked example for each formula to show the reader exactly what to do. The
“Elements of Boat Strength” has all of the formulas, tables, illustrations, and
examples that you need to calculate the scantlings according to the rule.

Even if you use
classical engineering methods for calculating structure you should seriously
consider making this book part of your reference library. Engineering methods
depend on accurate determination of loads. This is not always easy to do and in
some cases accuracy is questionable. Scantling rules based on long experience
with boat structures at sea can fill this gap.

Until now, manual
calculations of boat structure were, at best, tedious. Dave Gerr’s new book
changes this, making this complicated subject easy to understand and apply.

Recommendation:
Intermediate and Advanced students

MARINE COMPOSITES by
Eric Greene AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD

Eric Green's
comprehensive reference "Marine Composites" is available for at www.marinecomposites.com.
It reviews the technologies needed to engineer structures in composites for
large and small boats. If you click on the link for each chapter, you can
download the contents of the book in PDF format, at no cost.